I meant to write this a long time ago. Like at least a year ago. This draft has been sitting in my inbox for 3 quarters now and it's about time I start updating meaningful posts.
On February 22, 2010, Hanna Guthrie posted an article about the significance of Black History Month, about it now being outdated and that we need to embrace the "modern-day form of segregation". Insert a cartoon with bulging eyes and a jaw drop complete with sound effects. Did she just what I thought she said? There's more. She argued that "focusing on everyone's ethnic background in forms of club organizations and holidays makes us racist". Since when did celebrating our efforts and representations of our heritages racist? Dismissing "holidays" such as Black History Month as a waste of time just excused decades of hate crimes, innocent deaths, and the efforts of not just the Black community but of all other minority groups to fight racism in America.
Guthrie used Raina Kelley from Newsweek as a source in attempt to voice her opinion about modern-day racism. Kelley wanted to address the issues of educating and protecting impoverished black children. Instead of having just one month dedicated to Black history, she made a statement that every month should then be about Black history to teach these children how to succeed. Her article continued on about how our country's money has been poured into funding for a greener environments than the education system. There wasn't any mention about "bemoaning the existence of the month" wastes time. That was completely out of context. You do need to teach your children about history, whether racism related or not, how else are they going to learn how mankind evolved? Histories are supposed to help us avoid our mistakes or at least remind us how to be better people.
Guthrie made our government sound as if we poured all our time and effort into this overstated month and ignore other issues at hand. I wonder if she has ever taken the time to step back and try to understand how serious racism still is in the world.
In our Asian American psychology class, our professor asked us if it was possible for our country to un-racialize our population. That's just opening a can of worms. If not race, we'd argue about beliefs, and if not beliefs, sexual orientation. There's always going to be a label that we can argue about years on end. As humans, we naturally categorize (a nicer word we can use instead of segregate). Toddlers learn to differentiate not only shapes and colors, but also sound based on what they've learned on their own. Circles go into the circle section, blue blocks go into the blue box. We've been so accustomed to organize our memories or tangible objects into different sections. You cannot ask us to suddenly dismiss the category of race and not organize it somewhere.
Guthrie had the notion that race is purely 2-sided. It's no longer between Blacks and Whites, it's within the same race, between countries of many backgrounds, religious groups, it's everywhere. She had the audacity to say that she preferred that we stop hyphenating our identities and "wishe[d] we can just all be Americans" and "accept that we live in a country that accepts people from all nationalities and backgrounds". If our country truly respects us from all backgrounds, why do they still hyphenate us? And why do we still carry those labels around? Calling everyone an American here is just rolling over racial tension. We can't hide that some of us have red hair, some have freckles, others rough hair, slanted eyes, or darker skin. There is no such prototype for what an American is supposed to look like and those physical features hold us back from being purely "American".
This only further makes my point and argument last year about why we need ethnic studies to stay, not only on college campuses, but in middle schools, high schools. You would be surprised how rigidly practical some students are when they that taking an ethnic studies course for their GE is a waste of time and tuition money. It's downright baffling to me why they could not even understand a fraction of why we need to keep classes like those. Do you not see the protests on campus that's happening right now? It's not just about tuition hikes. You have many groups of students trying to support minority groups on campus for proper employment pay and treatment. And in current events, fight hate crimes that happened in UCSD or UCD. If you watch documentaries from the 1960s or 70s, you would think our campuses had a major flashback. It's frightening to see that some people think it would be a great joke to tie nooses and hang them in public parts of a university campus or to carve a swastika on a dormitory door of a Jewish freshmen. It's definitely not a laughing matter or something to just dismiss.
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